Nevada and Utah

NEVADA

Las Vegas is a crazy, fun and colorful place.  Everybody is looking to get rich quick – hit the jackpot and turn five dollars into a million.  Dreams of independent wealth fade quickly, but here where sensory stimulation trumps a meaningful travel experience, there’s plenty to do. 

We stayed at the Golden Nugget Hotel, one of the classic casino hotels downtown on Fremont Street, aka Glitter Gulch. 

                 

In the lobby is the world’s largest publicly displayed gold nugget, while the pool complex features a waterslide that goes through a 200,000 gallon shark tank.

Along a four-block pedestrian-only stretch of Fremont Street, vendors set up carts in the middle of the promenade, surrounded by caricature artists, henna tattoo booths, and street performers eager to relieve you of a few bucks.  It’s crazy enough in the daytime, but at night the Fremont Street Experience explodes with a light and sound show on the canopy roof covering the street.  With animation synched to music, we saw (or experienced) performances by Don McLean and Bon Jovi.  What a party!

Vegas, of course, is best known for the ‘strip,’ a four-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard that is a glittery, make-believe mini-universe – complete with replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Brooklyn Bridge, dancing Italian fountains, a lava-spewing volcano, an Arthurian castle, pirate ships, and a tower that looks like Seattle’s Space Needle on steroids.

We paid our respects to the Strip by visiting a few of the big casino-hotels.  Bellagio is known for its fountains, but indoors there is a larger-than-life greenhouse atrium, filling with living foliage in riotous colors and styles.  Flowers, plants, and remarkable decorations – all free to enjoy.

Wynn also features a conservatory filled with colorful, festive plants and flowers.  It’s not quite as wacky as Bellagio, but there’s no shortage of color.

New on the Strip is City Center-Las Vegas, which brings contemporary architecture to the cartoonish structures around it.  Quite a contrast. There are plenty of crazy-expensive shops, and the whole place is quite elegant … we maybe prefer crazy-tacky.

UTAH

Brigham Young found what he was looking for in the Salt Lake Valley.  We found what we were looking for in three of the state’s beautiful national parks – Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef.

Zion National Park sits in Utah’s high plateau country, where the Virgin River carves its way to the desert below through a gorge so deep and narrow that sunlight rarely penetrates to the bottom.  As the canyon widens, the river passes 3000-foot cliffs, slickrock peaks, and hanging valleys.  This is Zion, named by the Mormon pioneers who saw these sculpted rocks as the ‘natural temples of God.’

 

A million years of flowing water have cut through the red and white beds of Navajo sandstone that forms the sheer valley walls of Zion. 

 

It seems that every tower and cliff has a biblical name, such as Angel’s Landing, Great White Throne, West Temple, and the Three Patriarchs (pictured here).

Heading east, we got a good look at the Checkerboard Mesa, an example of naturally sculpted rock art.  Horizontal lines, the remnants of ancient sand beds, are etched into a checkerboard pattern by vertical fractures that have been enlarged over the years by runoff from rain and melting snow.

To exit the park, we went through a one-mile tunnel that was blasted out of solid sandstone.  Completed in 1930, it was considered an engineering feat at the time.  It’s a different story today:  two-way traffic had to be stopped for our coach to travel down the middle of the tunnel to avoid hitting the roof – even then, the clearance was only six inches. 

Bryce Canyon National Park is not really a canyon; rather it is a series of massive amphitheaters of fins and spires, pillars and castles – the largest of these amphitheaters is named Bryce Canyon.  At Bryce, you don’t look up at canyon walls; instead you look down from the rim of the 9000-foot Paunsaugunt Plateau – or walk down for a better look.

 

The view is unquestionably other-worldly.  Weirdly shaped rocks, spires and pinnacles known as ‘hoodoos’ stretch for miles, testament to the forces of erosion.  And not just ordinary erosion.  Here repeated freezing and thawing – as often as 200 times a year – have worn away the rock for millions of years.  The process continues today. The Paiute Indians believe that the hoodoos were created by the coyote god when he turned misbelieving people into pink pillars of stone.  Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon cattle rancher in the area, simply said that it was ‘a hell of a place to lose a cow.’  (Bryce Canyon and Theodore Roosevelt National Parks are the only national parks named after people.)

One of the most spectacular viewpoints in the park is Bryce Point, one of the highest overlooks along the rim of the amphitheater.

Another favorite is Sunset Point.  The mix of shadows and deep-hued colors make this a great vantage point in low-angled light.  One striking feature here is Thor’s Hammer; beyond is the Silent City, a grid-work of deep ravines and turreted walls suggesting strange ancient ruins.

Bryce Canyon is well-known to astronomers for its night sky, when some 7500 stars are visible – three times what can be seen in most rural areas of the U.S. This year, the astronomers came in the daytime – to watch the sun.  On May of this year, Bryce was prime spot for viewing the annular eclipse of the sun, and on June 5^th, for the transit of Venus.  We timed it just right for a view of Venus – a tiny black spot slipping across the face of the sun. 

Between parks, scenery wasn’t exactly shabby – lots of rocks, canyons, blue sky.  Sadly, we also saw smoke from several wildfires in the area.

 

Capitol Reef National Park is best known for the scenery along a 32-mile stretch of Highway 12 – it’s one of the most scenic roads in the U.S.  The park is  characterized by sandstone formations, cliffs and canyons – and a 100-mile long bulge in the earth’s crust called the Waterpocket Fold.  Erosion has carved the rock into wonderful shapes – a colorful array of twisting canyons, massive domes, monoliths and spires of sandstone.  It’s easy to see why Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall-Gang favored this area as a hideaway.

We entered the park driving east and staring at the eroded west face of the Waterpocket Fold – a massive line of cliffs running north and south. 





















The park visitor center is on the edge of Fruita, the remnants of a Mormon frontier community settled in the 1860s.  Some of the early homes and farm buildings have been restored and many of the original fruit trees remain.

 

Long before the Mormons, this area was populated by people of the Fremont Culture, which existed from about 700 to 1300 AD.  Archeologists have identified unique artifacts that define this group as culturally distinct from their better known contemporaries, the Anasazi.  Fremont rock art includes pictographs (painted on rock surfaces) and petroglyphs (carved into the rock surface).  The petroglyphs that we saw depict people, animals, and other shapes. 

The Great Salt Lake is all that remains of a huge lake that once covered the entire Salt Lake Valley.  It is very shallow and has no outlet; thus it is very salty – only the Dead Sea is saltier.  There is one island in the lake – Antelope Island features antelope, deer, and a herd of bison.

There is more wildlife along the shore than might have been expected.  Brine shrimp live here and represent a major industry for ‘sea monkeys’ and tropical fish food.  Birds are also abundant – lots of shorebirds and yellow-headed blackbirds dining on brine flies, which are plentiful.

Salt Lake City is Utah’s capital and largest city.  Mormon pioneers, led by Brigham Young, travelled west in search of religious freedom.  They found it in this arid territory that no one else seemed to want.  The city is laid out with streets that are wide and straight – per Young’s wishes, there’s plenty of room to turn around a wagon pulled by a team of oxen.  The city blocks are huge, one acre each, room enough for a man’s homes and farm. 

The Utah State Capitol sits high on a hill overlooking the city, with the Wasach Mountains to the left and the Mormon Temple visible to the right.

 
 

The building is considered one of the most beautiful of all state capitols.  The interior is grand, too, with a rotunda that features gleaming Georgia marble.

Even higher up in the hills is ‘This Is The Place’ Heritage Park – the location at which Brigham Young decreed that his band of pioneers would establish their community here.  The laid out the city, set up irrigation for crops, and the rest is history …

Temple Square is a 35-acre site that contains the most important buildings of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints.  The temple itself holds the ordinances sacred to the Mormon faith.  Construction began in 1853 and was completed in 1893.

The Tabernacle seats 6500 under one of the world’s largest dome roofs without center supports.  Its 11,623-pipe organ is said to be the largest in the world, and we were happy to attend an organ recital while we were in town.  The Tabernacle also is home to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; its 360 volunteer singers have been going strong since the mid-1800s.

The Family History Library, founded in 1894, is one of the world’s largest genealogical libraries.  For future reference, there are over 300 computers available for use in this five-floor, 145,000-square foot facility.  Volunteers and professional researchers were eager to assist us ancestor-seekers – too bad we only had a few hours there.